Remembering life in north London
WWII seems a long time ago, but as I am thinking about it, so many details come back to me very clearly.
Following Neville Chamberlain’s earlier broadcast, where he declared ‘Hitler had missed the bus’, Father, Mother and I gathered around the wireless on 3 September 1939 to hear that we were at war with Germany. My father thought Mother and I would be safer away from our home in North London and so persuaded us to self-evacuate to various places around the country. However, it turned out that none of these places were much safer, and so we returned home after about three months and I returned to my old school.
My school was a small one and, to start with, we all went down to the shelter in the playground whenever the air raid sirens went off and we did our lessons there. During the early part of the war, I remember Mother and I sleeping under the dining table; it obviously did not occur to us that this would have afforded us little protection if a bomb had dropped on our house!
There were various bombs, including land mines, incendiaries – for which the air-raid wardens were provided with stirrup pumps to put out any resulting fires – V2s and doodlebugs, with the fearful silence until they dropped and exploded.
I do hope that I appreciated how resourceful my mother was in producing tasty and nutritious meals for us from the meagre rations available – for example, two ounces of cheese and one egg per person per week! So-called luxury items, such as a can of fruit, were issued on a points system and so we would save up if there were a special occasion. Part of my mother’s weekly routine was queuing up at Mac Fisheries in the hope that there would have been a delivery of ration-free fish. We also had clothes rationing, and I clearly remember my green coat made out of an old blanket!
I left school in 1943, having taken and passed my School Certificate exams. I travelled to college and law school every day on the Piccadilly Line. As one passed through most stations, one could see where local residents had spent their nights sleeping on the platforms, sheltering from the bombs.
At the weekends my friends and I often went to small local dances, coming out into very dark streets. There were no street lights and, of course, no lights coming from houses – if home owners didn’t draw their thick black-out curtains, they would hear the shout of the air-raid warden: ‘Put that light out!’. However, there was usually a nice young man who would see you safely home. The girls from college in central London would tell me of the adventures they had with the overseas servicemen.
We were fortunate that as a family we had no one away serving in the forces and so did not have the continual worry that we would hear news of a death, injury or capture.
On VE Day I went up to London with friends and we all waved our flags, full of hope for the future. But that was not the end. Over the following few months, many lives were lost.
Shared by Betty Aston
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